Is criticism dying, or is that just your view?

You could see it coming. Mark Wallinger wins this year's Turner prize for his recreation of peace campaigner Brian Haw's protest in Parliament Square and all the newspapers lead with a picture of him dressed up in a bearsuit. The message is clear: Wallinger is a joke, the judges have got lost up their pretentious backsides and Britart is rubbish. Readers all over the country will have been nodding in agreement.

Now, Wallinger may be a joke, the judges might have spent too long in London's trendy Hoxton, and most of Britart might be rubbish - but very few of us are qualified to make an informed judgment one way or the other. Most won't have ever heard of Wallinger - or indeed the judges - and their knowledge of Britart will be limited to a few soundbites about Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. But what the hell? These days, all opinions and prejudices are equally valid. So if you think Wallinger is crap, then he is crap.

It's tough being a serious critic in these relativist times and many thought John Carey, emeritus Merton professor of English literature at Oxford University and distinguished literary critic, who has twice chaired the Booker prize judging committee, had done for the profession completely with his 2005 book, What Good Are the Arts?, in which he argued that there are no objective aesthetic standards.

Two years on, Carey stands by what he wrote. "There are only opinions," he says, "albeit some more informed than others. The idea of evaulation - what I like is better than what you like and my feelings are more important than yours - is just illogical. You cannot know the state of another person's consciousness, so you can't make those judgments. I also got taken to task for apparently suggesting that literature was different - that it responded to the rationality of criticism in a way that no other art form did. But I never said any such thing. I made it clear that my ideas on literature were mine alone, and that I was writing from a personal perspective."

None of this went uncontested by other academics and one of the first out of the blocks was Justin O'Connor, chair of cultural industries at Leeds University, with a lengthy critique in the journal Critical Quarterly. "There is clearly a hierarchy of the good and not so good in the arts," he insists, "and it's established by the critics. People's everyday experience leads them to make judgments, and together we make collective judgments. Pure relativism is absurd; regardless of whether you like Ian McEwan's novels, you have to accept that his judgments on literature carry more weight, simply because he is a practitioner, engaging with writing every day.

"Carey is also quick to condemn elitism, but while it is true there are minority arts, he fails to differentiate between different minorities. The visual arts may not have a mass popular appeal but they are popular, and one of the first things any city that wants to rethink its image does is to invest in them. Galleries have become a powerful symbol of vibrancy and economic influence; that's why so many Chinese cities are crying out for the kind of piss and blood artworks we see here in the west."

The latest person to defend the critic is Ronan McDonald, lecturer in the school of English and American studies at Reading University and director of the Beckett International Foundation, in his new book, The Death of the Critic. "The days when people venerated critics, such as Leavis, as arbiters of taste are long over," he says. "I don't want to get too golden ageist about this, because Leavis could be rebarbative and prescriptive, but he did strive to take criticism beyond the ivory towers and we have lost something. Scientists, philosophers and historians all seek to reach a wider market and we should do the same."

Reasons for decline

McDonald goes on to argue there is no one root cause of the critic's decline. It's partly a result of the egocentrism of the 1980s where everyone's voice is equally important, partly a reaction to the evidently self-serving practice of friends reviewing each others' books in the media, and partly the legacy of the Oedipal desire of the generation of critical theorists who learned at the feet of men like Leavis to kick aside the old values of their teachers. But the effect has been to make criticism an outpost of the social sciences; art now exists only to be understood within a political, social and cultural context - with all considerations of creativity and aesthetics marginalised into non-existence.

"In a world of celebrity critics and blogs, there has to be place for a more evaluative response of the academic," he continues. "The relativists are making judgments, even if they insist they are not, and if every artistic activity is merely subject to the less challenging consensus view, it's a recipe for dull uniformity. We all want to avoid elitism, but without a critical hierarchy, all we achieve is conservatism. I would like to see more of an overlap between critical and creative writing, and so avoid the worst attributes of both - deliberate mystification or wishy-washy impressionism."

Colin MacCabe, distinguished professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh and professor of English and humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, takes issue with parts of McDonald's argument. "I'm not sure there was ever a time when people hung on a critic's every word in the way he suggests they did with Leavis." But he agrees that the role of the critic has become marginalised. "I can date it precisely in film," he says. "It was when Jaws came out. For the first time a film had a simultaneous rather than a staggered nationwide release; it was done to maximise studio revenues, but a knock-on effect was to negate what little influence the critic held."

Relativism does have its upsides, though, as art forms that might once have been dismissed as too trivial for serious criticism are now put through their academic paces. For Dr Matthew Pateman, director of media, culture and society at the University of Hull, the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer has become a research subject in its own right. "It's noticeably different from other programmes," he points out. "It's witty, intelligent and deals carefully with complex moral issues." Pop music, too, has benefited from a baby-boomer generation of Oxbridge and NME graduates switching from lit-crit to rock-crit.

The effect of relativism

Many, though, would argue that the overall effect of relativism has been detrimental to criticism, both in the wider and academic worlds. "People now just talk of critical thinking as something formulaic, a transferable skill that will help you get a job," says Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent. "So we have ended up turning it into an unthinking mechanical response rather than an intellectual and emotional engagement. The promiscuous notion that everyone's view is equally important also makes us dishonest. We rarely give children's opinions equal weight to others'. For instance, the Golden Compass is primarily a children's film, yet we have heard very few children expressing their thoughts about it in the media."

The knock-on effect of all this is that criticism is often seen at best as a trivial activity and at worst as a parasitical one. No one dares call himself a critic pure and simple any more; it has to be writer and critic or artist and critic or nothing, and Pateman reckons this is reflected in the attitudes of today's university students. "There is a general belief that the individual's view is paramount," he says. "Criticism is now more of a pragmatic tool that enables them to write an essay and not a central part of their teaching and learning."

Curiously, it is Carey, the man who has been vilified by critics for his relativism, who remains the most optimistic about the discipline's future. "If we can get away from the wilful obscurantism of a few academics talking to each other in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement it can only be a good thing," he laughs. "And I don't accept that students are more concerned with their own opinions these days. My experience is that most undergraduates know they don't know very much about literature and are eager to learn so they can have an opinion. They also understand that if they want to study English literature, then they are going to have to read Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, so the basics of the canon are not in dispute."

You also can't help thinking that these arguments are set to run and run. And in that case any suggestions of the death of the critic look rather premature.